Where are we

Tuesday 31 March 2020

Russell, Bay of Islands, New Zealand

Tim and I are well, and we hope that all of you and yours are too.  New Zealand is currently beginning the 2nd week of a 4 week lockdown. If you are curious on how they are doing things here this is their website - New Zealand Government Website Unite Against Covid19.

We are very fortunate to be here.  The Government has extended visas for visiting yachts crew who have 6 month visas valid until the end of April.  If your visa was due to expire as mine was before that time, you must apply for a visa extension, which allows you to stay in the country for a additional three months.  We arrived quite early last year and unlike Tim, I have not left the country, which reboots your visa, so I filled out the online form, paid the money and was advised within a week that my visa extension had been granted.  With that in hand, we are both allowed to remain in the country till the end of September.  We expect there will be further extensions depending how the worldwide fight against the virus goes.

Being in lockdown as a cruiser isn’t really much of a change, though it happened so quickly there was a little scrabbling around to finish provisioning.  The Alert Levels were introduced only 4 or 5 days before we found ourselves at Level 4 a week ago.

We relocated from the Whangarei area to the Bay of Islands, which has much easier access to supermarkets and chemists/drugstores/pharmacies.  We can also find bays which have clearer water for water-making not too far away.

Now it is just quiet.  There is very little going on, which is as it should be. We are encouraged to go out for exercise once a day and we do take advantage of that particularly as the weather is so nice.



Do your best to keep safe and well and we will too.

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Nancy and Tim